Representative of System Capital Management have claimed that the beneficiary of EPIC that purchased Ukrtelecom at a privatization tender through ESU LLC in 2011 was in fact the oligarch and the then head of Ukraine’s State Security Service (SBU) Valeriy Khoroshkovsky, Interfax-Ukraine reports.

“Testimonies from Peter Goldscheider, who is a managing partner of EPIC Group, and Robert Shetler-Jones, who is the deputy board chairman of the supervisory board of Group DF, say Khoroshkovsky was the ultimate beneficiary of EPIC at the time of the privatization. It is surprising that SCM Financial needs to prove something when Raga testifies this,” Director of International and Investor Relations at SCM Jock Mendoza-Wilson said in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine.

He said it would be appropriate for representatives of Raga/EPIC to explain the details of participation of the person occupying the head of the State Security Service post at the time when Ukrtelecom was being privatized with participation of his business partner Dmytro Firtash.

Mendoza-Wilson also discussed a number of inconsistencies in the financial provisions of the agreement.

“Let us look deeper. The price of Ukrtelecom’s privatization in 2011 was estimated at $1.3 billion. Witnesses from Raga during the litigation and Denys Horbunenko in his recent interviews claim that some $300 million was borrowed by EPIC and Khoroshkovsky from Firtash and his company Picabo. The question arises – where did the rest of the $1 billion needed to privatize Ukrtelecom come from? It is not likely that EPIC and Goldscheider had the extra cash in order to complete the privatization of Ukrtelecom,” he said.

Mendoza-Wilson said that EPIC was an Austria-based family consulting and investment corporation with insignificant assets in the real estate and telecommunications markets of Eastern Europe. He also raised suspicions in regards to Goldscheider’s ability to raise $1.3 billion necessary for the privatization of Ukrtelecom from Western donors.